Subject: reporting a problem

From: MANMEET SINGH <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 1997 13:54:17 +0530 (IST)

Dear sir
    I have received an e-mail from New York University school of medicine.
It has a message with 4 attachments: 16KB textonly, 16KB dostext, 24KB
dostext and 24KB worddoc. All these attachments are in OCTET-STREAM. These
can't be viewed by the Pine software on which my connection is working.
The attachments have been saved in the home directory. Information
displayed about the attachments is as follows
                    Type               Application
                    Subtype            OCTET STREAM
                    Encoding           BASE64
                    Parameters         Name= <Niersh01>Textonly  
                    Description        " "
                    Approx. size       16,402 bytes
                    Display method     can't, unknown attachment format
          I shall be grateful if any body is able to fix the bug, and also
help me know how to view and copy the files from home directory.
       With regards
      Gurcharan Singh

---

From: Ed Greshko <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 1997 16:53:02 +0800 (GMT)

> help me know how to view and copy the files from home directory.

	There is no bug.

	The MIME type application/octet-stream is the most basic way to
transfer a binary file.  There is no indication as to what application
may be associated with the attached file.  Had it been image/gif, or
application/msword, then you may (or may not) have an entry in a mailcap
file which tells pine what application to call in order to render the
attachment.

	Since it was sent as application/octet-stream you will have
to make some "assumptions" about the content, save the data to disk,
manually call an application to reder the attachment.  For example,
there is a good chance that MSWord will be the application needed
to render "24KB worddoc".

	If you don't know what application should be used for each
attachment and you can't determine it my trial and error then you will
need to contact the sender and ask them....

	Ed

-- 
Edward M. Greshko                  Technical Manager, Electronic Commerce
                                   Control Data Asia/Pacific Region
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